Wednesday, November 25, 2009

American channel HBO is about to air a documentary on the Mumbai terror attacks last year, including almost 20 minutes of recordings of phone conversations between the terrorists in Mumbai and their controller in Pakistan, a man called “Brother Wasi”.

This is not a documentary for the young to watch, or even for those adults who crumble easily. How to process the telephone conversation between Wasi and the gunman holed up in Mumbai’s Chabad House, where a few American Jews are held hostage? Wasi says: “As I told you, every person you kill where you are”—referring to the Jewish building—“is worth 50 of the ones killed elsewhere.” Later, as Indian army commandos close in on the building, Wasi, watching the scene on TV in Pakistan, fears that the last surviving gunman there will be taken alive. So he orders him to shoot the last two Jewish hostages forthwith: “Yes, sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head.” The gunman, now weak with hunger and thirst, obliges. We hear a shot. Wasi does, too — he is on the line. What about the second shot, he asks. “I got them both,” he is told, by the gunman.

At the time, many of the news reports did not even mention Chabad House by name, when explaining which buildings had been attacked; the significance of the target was ignored, downplayed, or perhaps not even understood. As Jeffrey Goldberg notes, this phone transcript illustrates the genocidal antisemitism of the Jihadist movement only too clearly.